


Christmas Cookies

by Swump (Zelan)



Series: 12 Days of Whumpmas - VLD [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Baking, Burns, Gen, VLD Whumpmas 2017, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-28 09:07:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13268220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zelan/pseuds/Swump
Summary: Hunk should really pay more attention to what he's doing.





	Christmas Cookies

Cooking with Altean equipment and ingredients always required concentration. Everything was new and unfamiliar. Hunk couldn’t let his mind drift off like he did when he cooked anything at home or he was liable to end up with something that nobody wanted to eat, not even the mice, and they were significantly less picky than any of his friends.

What it was that was distracting him that day, he couldn’t have said. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that Hunk hadn’t been wearing any kind of protection when he reached into the oven.

The tray clattered loudly to the floor, covering Hunk’s cry of pain. He sagged against the counter, hunched over his burned hands. He felt his eyes beginning to well up and tried to blink the tears away, only to feel them already rolling down his cheeks.

A shadow appeared in the doorway. “Hunk?”

“Keith.” The single word held all of Hunk’s emotions - his pain, his embarrassment and simultaneous relief at being found. Keith crossed the room to get to him, closing the oven as he passed it, and wordlessly held out his hands. Hunk extended his own so that Keith could see, inhaling sharply when Keith’s finger brushed against the tender skin.

“Sorry.” Keith carefully adjusted his grip, peering at Hunk’s hands with an unreadable expression. As gently as he could, he straightened Hunk’s curled fingers to get a better look at them.

“I think you’ll be okay,” he said finally, starting to pull Hunk in the direction of the sink. “They look like first-degree burns.”

“Isn’t first-degree the worst one?” Hunk asked nervously.

A tiny smile quirked up Keith’s lips. “That’s murder. The worst burns are third-degree.” He twisted the handle to turn the sink on, placing a finger under the steady stream to monitor the temperature. When it was to his liking, he placed Hunk’s hands under the water.

Hunk winced at first; the water passing over his burns felt like too much for the sensitive skin. Keith firmly held Hunk’s wrists in place, though, and eventually Hunk was able to relax as the cold started to lessen the pain.

Keith finally noticed the dropped sheet. “Were you… making Christmas cookies?” The sugar cookies, strewn on and off the platter, were meticulously cut into five-point stars. Hunk would have liked to do gingerbread people like he usually did, but without any cookie cutters he’d had to settle for geometric shapes he could cut with a knife.

“Yeah.”

“Why?” The question threw Hunk.

“Well… I mean, it’s right around that time on Earth. I asked Pidge and she said it’s, like, December 23rd or something.”

“I didn’t even think about it,” Keith confessed. “I just kind of figured that… y’know, we wouldn’t celebrate it in space.”

Hunk shrugged. “I don’t know if we’re really gonna do anything big. It’s just, everyone’s been so down recently. I mean, it’s understandable, given the fact that we’ve been away from our homes for months, and the Galra are constantly on our tail, and we’re really poorly equipped to handle, like, any attacks from them-”

“Hunk.”

“Sorry. But, anyway, I just wanted to do something to try to cheer everyone up a bit. And cookies usually work for that. I just sort of went with the Christmas idea on the spot.”

Keith nodded slowly. “I guess that makes sense.” Leaving Hunk by the sink, he walked over and picked up the cookie sheet, careful to hold it level and avoid losing any more cookies. Hunk was saddened by the amount left on the floor, but it wasn’t unsalvageable; about half of the batch was left unharmed.

“Do you think you could decorate those for me?” Keith whipped around, eyes wide. Hunk had surprised himself with the question, actually, but he knew immediately that it was a good idea.

“Me?” Keith was hesitant, but Hunk saw him waver when he darted a glance down at Hunk’s hands, still sore and red under the water. He tried to make his expression as pitiful as possible. It seemed to work, because Keith seemed to panic a bit when he looked back up at Hunk.

“I don’t… I wouldn’t… I mean, I’d probably just ruin them. I don’t know anything about decorating cookies.” He looked down at the still-warm cookies, uncertainty clouding his eyes.

“You’ll do fine. I can walk you through it from over here,” Hunk encouraged. “It’s easy. Just frosting and sprinkles. Or the closest I could get to frosting and sprinkles, anyway.”

“All right.” Keith gave in. “What do I do first?”

Hunk nodded towards the bowl of yellow frosting he’d managed to make with some creative engineering of the food goo. “Give that a good stir or two and then just spread it over the cookies. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just try and make it even.”

He craned his neck to watch as Keith followed his instructions, face pinched in a frown of concentration. It took him several minutes to frost the first cookie; he was being incredibly careful, perhaps more than was necessary. Still, Hunk waited patiently as Keith moved onto the next one and then the next. As he got used to working with the frosting, he fell into a rhythm, and each one was completed more quickly than the last.

“How’s that?” he asked when he’d finally finished the last one. His voice betrayed no emotion, but Hunk could tell by looking into his eyes that he was nervous, not sure if he’d gained Hunk’s approval.

He had nothing to worry about, of course. The frosting was a bit thinner than Hunk would have done, but that was an individual choice, not necessarily a bad one. The cookies looked beautiful - the frosting went right up to the edges of each one, and was evenly spread. Hunk turned off the sink and walked over to get a closer look, noticing as he did so that Keith had a way of swirling the knife that left a delicate pattern in the frosting.

“You did great,” he said warmly. Keith smiled widely. Hunk was surprised at how readily the smile came, but the smile was contagious; he couldn’t help smiling back.

“Now it’s just the sprinkles,” he said, nodding towards the various garnishes that he’d found and set out earlier. “You can use all of them on each cookie, or different ones, or whatever you want. Leave some without any, too. I think Shiro likes them better that way,” he added as an afterthought.

Keith examined each container, weighing his options, while Hunk gently patted his hands dry with a towel. They were still a bit raw, but the burns were much less painful than they’d been earlier. He’d ask Coran if there was any sort of ointment he could use later.

Keith was intently focused on decorating the star cookies now. He’d already covered about a quarter of them with some sort of silver flakes, and had moved on to carefully arranging long red strips of something across another set of stars. Hunk nodded his approval at the neat lines.

Lastly, Keith opened the container of green powder that Hunk had found. “Is this one… spicy?”

“I think so,” Hunk answered. “Maybe go easy on that one.”

A mischievous grin crossed Keith’s face. Dumping an inordinate amount onto one of the cookies, he announced, “That one’s for Lance.”

**Author's Note:**

> when u just wanted to write a cute gen fic but now u ship it


End file.
